Designing TinkMate: A Seamless Tinkering Companion for Engineering Design Kits

Tinkering is a successful approach to solving complex engineering design problems. Complexity arises due to constraints from the problem space where the available conceptual knowledge is to be applied to solve the problem. On the other hand, tinkering requires working in the problem space with the available tools and resources to find solutions to the problem at hand. Prior knowledge of affordances of tools and resources available for tinkering through a problem or ability to acquire such information in the time of need is a challenge for an engineer who is a novice at tinkering. Gathering this information from manuals and online resources frequently requires switching context, which inhibits or discourages tinkering with the unknown components. To address this challenge, we propose to build a tinkering companion, TinkMate, using a robot for interaction and augmented reality for providing essential information. From a contextual inquiry in a young engineers robotics workshop, we have found that delivering just in time information about unknown components; and providing triggers on tinkering in a seamless human-like communicative manner, encourages experimentation with components of a kit. We plan to build and test a prototype of TinkMate using an off the shelf robot (COZMO) and features like just in time information (JITI) and just in time triggers for tinkering (JIT3). We would also like to study features that encourage participants and enable reflection, which has emerged on further exploration of this concept.